Enterprise was on the air four years and in that time we never saw anyone ranked Lt. Commander nor was anyone of that rank mentioned. It's perfectly reasonable to assume such rank does not exist in the United Earth Starfleet.

And if the lieutenant commander rank did exist in UE Starfleet, it would have made way more sense for the writers to give that rank to Tucker, thereby giving T'Pol's assertion in Broken Bow that she outranked Tucker at least *some* defensibility.

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

It's also perfectly reasonable to assume it DOES exist. To wit:

- Earth Starfleet is a navy. It may not be THE navy, but it is *a* navy.

Enterprise is the only Star Trek show where, when the characters claim Starfleet is not military, I can actually believe them. I can easily see UES using some naval ranks as "job grades" without adopting the whole structure. (Of course, the show writers didn't really stick to this, because they ended up using UES ships in a military role all the time, just like in the 23rd & 24th century shows.)

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

- We never saw anybody promoted straight from Lieutenant to Commander, did we?

Did we ever see anyone get promoted to anything? Even the finale, supposedly five years after the previous episode, still had everyone at the same rank!

OK, to be fair... in the First Flight flashbacks, Tucker was a lieutenant, and in the series he was a commander. And in the alt-future from Twilight Lieutenant Reed had been promoted to commander. But since there were significant time gaps between both of these examples, and we never saw either promoted directly, I guess this is inconclusive.

Christopher wrote:

And whatever the case with the UE Starfleet, there are lieutenant commanders in the UFP Starfleet as of RotF.

As it should be.

EDIT follows:

Christopher wrote:

^Kirk was promoted from captain to admiral prior to TMP and again prior to TWOK. But it's generally accepted that he was a rear admiral, which in the US Navy was the equivalent of the commodore rank once that rank was phased out -- i.e. just one step up from captain rather than two.

To be fair, I believe Rear Admiral Lower Half is the USN equivalent of commodore, and based on Kirk's stripes in TMP, he would have been equivalent to USN's Rear Admiral Upper Half, still two steps up from captain.

Personally, I find the whole upper/lower half thing clunky. The Canadian Navy still proudly uses the rank of Commodore.

Last edited by Avro Arrow; April 22 2013 at 02:01 AM.
Reason: Respond to a post that was posted while I was typing...